Justified terminological reasoning

Abstract

Justification logics are epistemic logics that include explicit justifications for an agent's knowledge. In the present paper, we introduce a justification logic JALC over the description logicALC. We provide a deductive system and a semantics for our logic and we establish soundness and completeness results. Moreover, we show that our logic satisfies the so-called internalization property stating that it internalizes its own notion of proof. We then sketch two applications of JALC: (i) the justification terms can be used to generate natural language explanations why an ALC statement holds and (ii) the terms can be used to study data privacy issues for description logic knowledge bases. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.